


The Beta Testers

by whenyouheldtheknife



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Multi, Romance, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 07:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whenyouheldtheknife/pseuds/whenyouheldtheknife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's take the premise of Lemonade Mouth (a thing that Disney owns and I do not) and put the beta kids into it and see what happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beta Testers

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! If you didn't see it in the summary, this is me taking the premise of Lemonade Mouth and putting the beta kids into it, because I saw the movie again recently and thought, why not, right? 
> 
> All pairings listed will occur at some point during the story, just not right away.
> 
> Disclaimer/whatever these are called; I don't own Lemonade Mouth, Disney does.

You couldn’t believe that you’d somehow landed yourself in detention again. Dave Strider, cool kid extraordinaire, in trouble? Bullshit, you’d tell them. Except that your saying bullshit would be actual bullshit. You were actually in detention kind of often. 

At least you arrived before the bell rang, unlike whoever the hell the other kids were, who seemed to think that they could just waltz in the room fifteen minutes late with Starbucks. 

All right, so no one really arrived fifteen minutes late, or with Starbucks. But they were still later than you were. 

One chick walked in only a few minutes after you did; she stepped around like she had lightning burning up her extremities and she held her head high, with her hair pushed back and held to impeccable standards by a plain headband. She sat near the front of the room, though, which totally destroyed any cred you may have been willing to give her for walking in like a badass. 

The next person to walk in was some dorky-looking kid who – hey, you’d seen this kid before, earlier in the day, when you’d tried to help him out of that scrape he’d gotten in with some of the upperclassmen. 

But if the new blue bruise blossoming on the paper skin of his jaw was anything to go by, you’d been dragged off by the teachers too early. 

He walked in and paused, seeming to assess his surroundings; he had probably never even known a room like this existed. His eyes landed on you and widened in recognition behind the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. The guy looked like he wanted to sit himself either near the front or near the door, but instead he chose a spot closer to you, nearer the middle of the room. You kind of liked that, but hoped that he didn’t think you were just going to be able to help him any old time, now. Your nose was still a little sore from the punch it’d taken for his sorry ass earlier. 

And then, in walked a girl who had your heart slamming out a whole new drum line in your chest. She had this long, black hair that you wanted to touch just once, to see if it really felt like a waterfall, which was what it looked like. 

She was walking slowly, but then again, she was also holding a huge textbook a few inches from her face and was muttering quietly to herself, probably reading aloud. You did that, too; you got that. She ended up taking a seat nearer the back of the room, a row behind you and the other guy, but closer to him than to you. 

You tried not to think about the fact that they had all left you a bit of a berth when they had come in and sat down, even the lightning-walker chick, and tried to attribute it to the fact that there was still some dried blood on your face and that you were wearing your shades inside. Or, well, that was what you told yourself was the reason for the distance. 

A teacher bustled into the room and you just about groaned. You really didn’t like this guy at all. 

“Only four of you today? I must say that I am surprised, not at the highness of the number, but rather at the fact that it is so much lower than usual,” he began, pushing the sleeves of the stupid red turtleneck that he wore at least twice a week up to his elbows. “However, a small audience is better than no audience at all. I have been meaning to practice this monologue for a good few days now, and with a captive audience – as well as one that is surely in need of proper culturing – I doubt that I will ever have such an opportunity as this to practice again.” The man paused to smile at you and the others and you almost let the snarky comment that’d been lurking behind your teeth slip out, but luckily for your permanent record, the phone rang and stopped you. 

There were four audible sighs of relief in the room, and yours was loudest. 

“One moment, and my deepest apologies, I must take this call outside. You lot wouldn’t know, but it is school policy. Please resist the urge to vandalize the property in this room and stay seated during my absence,” he said, before picking up the phone and leaving the room with it, letting the door shut on the cord so that none of you could hear the conversation. 

The room fell silent as a crypt as soon as he left. You glanced at each of your fellow cryptmates in turn. Lightning chick was scribbling in her journal. The other guy was staring at the ground. Waterfall hair was buried cerebellum-deep in her textbook. Boring, you thought, and you turned your gaze to the other half of the room. 

It was populated with old instruments in severe need of use, some of which were a damn nice set of drums, a plethora of guitars and basses and other stringed instruments, and an old piano that had at least an inch and a half of dust on it. The room was basically storage-turned-classroom, created only because a few parents had thrown a fit about the arts being squashed by the sports program. 

Your eyes lingered on that drum set and you began tapping your feet absentmindedly on the floor, followed by your hands lightly banging on the desks. Not loud enough to irritate, just loud enough for attention and to express boredom. Ba-dum-dum, THUMP. Ba-dum-dum, THUMP. 

Someone started tapping a tiny rhythm. Tap-tap-tap-tap-clank, tap-tap-tap-tap CLANK. 

Without missing a beat, you turned your head around and made eye contact with waterfall hair, who was doing the other rhythm. 

And unbelievably, the other guy began humming, and you could hear lightning chick chime in with a harmony. 

The other guy got up, still humming, walked over the piano, and with a broad sweep to rid the keys of the dust, began playing the melody he had been humming. 

Well, you couldn’t leave him hanging, could you? 

Using your body as your instrument, you continued banging out your beat until you reached the drums and, on finding the sticks exactly where they should be, you picked them up and immediately began beating out something more interesting. 

Waterfall hair and lightning chick had followed you, each gravitating towards a string instrument: waterfall girl chose bass and lightning chick snagged a violin and bow. You were skeptical about the violin until you heard her start to play the harmony she’d been humming moments before, and waterfall hair on bass was fucking fantastic, hitting all the right chords. 

And just when you thought shit couldn’t get any more unreal, the other guy began singing. “And I hope you know that we’re waiting, we’re waiting,” he sang, and you would swear on a stack of Bibles that there was an angel living in his throat, the way those notes flowed from him like he’d sung them before. 

“And that you can’t, can’t, can’t, take the beat away from us,” violin girl chimed in, smiling over at piano guy, who nodded his affirmation, and she continued with, “And that we want, want, want to hear you scream it out, scream it out,” and damn, you were just along for the ride now, picking up the pace as waterfall hair let loose with some of the best damn bass playing you had ever heard, bringing the rest of you all back down to where you were supposed to be, when you all ended at the same time. 

Then, there was silence, for a long moment, and you wondered who was going to break it first; it wasn’t going to be you. 

“That was kick ass!” the girl playing bass blurted out, grinning and giggling at herself as she made eye contact with you and then with the other two. The other guy began laughing himself, and you could see them getting along easily. You glanced over bass girl’s head at violin girl and shrugged, the both of you wearing near-identical smirks. 

“Hey, that really was amazing,” bass girl said, calming down from her giggles and smiling earnestly at each of you in turn. “I’m Jade, who are you all?” 

“Dave,” you said first, because she’d left off looking at you, and you wanted to be the name she remembered. 

“John,” the other guy at the piano said. 

“Rose,” offered the violinist. 

“John, Rose, y’all got some rad voices,” you said, looking between the both of them with your usual stoic face on. Rose smiled and thanked you, but John, John looked like he needed somewhere to go sit down, or maybe throw up, at the compliment. 

“Uh, I’m not, I’m just, trained?” he offered, but that only made you crack a smirk, and Jade giggle. She opened her mouth to, presumably, toss a retort back at John, when the door opened and the teacher came back in. 

“What are you all doing out of your seats!” he exclaimed, stopping and looking between the four of you. “Never mind, I don’t want to know, just step away from the instruments and take a seat. You four clearly need a lecture on the importance of rule-following, as you all seem to be severely lacking in that department of reason.” 

You followed the rest of the four back to your seat; John had been first to get up and first to sit down. His whole face was bright red, all the way up to his ears, and you bit back a snicker. You’d just love to rag on that kid until he turned that color permanently; it seemed easy enough. 

“Mr. Strider, do you find something funny?” the teacher snapped at you, and you immediately returned your expression to its usual stoic stare. 

“No, sir,” you deadpanned, and the idiot of a teacher didn’t even catch the wryness behind your voice. 

“You better not, because that would be very insensitive towards a cause that is dear to my heart. That cause would be the importance of rule-following, as well as the consequences that occur when the rules are broken.” He paused for a second, and then began droning on about how rules began. 

You sat through the hour of detention almost tolerably, preoccupied with the thoughts of that impromptu jam session you’d just had with four strangers. When you all left the room at the end of the hour and went your separate ways, you would still be strangers. 

But something had happened. 

Change was coming. 


End file.
